The New Arab Journalist

Mission and Identity in a Time of Turmoil

Lawrence Pintak

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780857730084
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Arab media is in the midst of a revolution that will inform questions of war and peace in the Middle East, political and societal reform, and relations between the West and the Arab World. Drawing on the first broad cross-border survey of Arab journalists, first-person interviews with scores of reporters and editors, and his three decades' experience reporting from the Middle East, Lawrence Pintak examines how Arab journalists see themselves and their mission at this critical time in the evolution of the Arab media. He explores how, in a diverse Arab media landscape expressing myriad opinions, journalists are still under siege as governments fight a rear-guard action to manage the message. This innovative book breaks through the stereotypes about Arab journalists to reveal the fascinating and complex reality - and what it means for the rest of us.

PART I

The Media Landscape

1

Red Lines – The Boundaries of Journalistic Freedom

As long as you don’t write about the king, the military, religion or sex you can cover anything you want.

Sameh al-Mahariq, Jordanian journalist

The Arab media is deep in the throes of change. It is a complex and often painful process, driven by regional rivalries, steeped in domestic political intrigue, and too often marred by physical violence.

“Anyone who tells you they are not scared silly is lying,” retired An-Nahar publisher Ghassan Tueni, the living symbol of Lebanese media independence, said in the autumn of 2005 as we sat in his office overlooking Beirut’s port and newly reborn downtown. Lebanon – and its media – had been experiencing a renaissance after decades of internecine violence during which most of the country’s polarized media outlets were willing weapons of civil war. Now media was once more on the firing line, this time in a confrontation over Syrian influence in Lebanon.

As we spoke, a leading Lebanese television anchor, Mai Chidiac, lay fighting for her life after an assassination attempt, and in the An-Nahar newsroom down the hall was a silent memorial to one of the paper’s columnists, Samir Kassir, blown up when he turned the ignition key of his car a few months before. “We built this glass tower as a symbol of the new Lebanon,” Tueni said, motioning toward the floor-to-ceiling windows. “Now it has become a fortress under siege. I’m waiting for someone on one of those ships out there to fire a rocket through my window.” Two months later, his son, An-Nahar publisher Gibran Tueni, was dead; his armored sports utility vehicle torn apart by a remote-controlled car bomb. The assassins struck less than 24 hours after the heir to the journalistic dynasty had returned from Paris, where he had been in self-exile after being warned he was at the top of a hit list. The Tueni assassination sent a chill through the Lebanese media, but for journalists there, fear was nothing new. “For years we had this paranoia,” said Tania Mehanna, a reporter at the privately owned Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC). “Every time you get into your car before you turn the key you think it is the last time. Then you have another kind of pressure, which is the phone call which you get from the politician or from some kind of faction where they want to stop what you filmed during the day or they put pressure on the TV station not to run the story.”

“I do not say anything related to politics, [I] hate politics,” explained Hadia Sirrow, a reporter for the newspaper Al-Mustaqbal. “But you feel that you are involved too. So we’re in this house and we are scared.”

Media has always been a tool of power, nowhere more so than the Arab world, a region in which every country but three – Kuwait, Lebanon, and Egypt – were regularly ranked as “not free” on Freedom House’s press freedom surveys, and none qualified as “free.” “There’s much to demonstrate in the last six or seven decades that media were accomplices in the general political cover-up of the truth,” according to Lebanese Information Minister Michel Samaha.¹ And as Jamil Mroue, publisher of Beirut’s Daily Star told a Dubai gathering in late 2005, the media continued to serve as “tools” of political structures in which “control is the name of the game.” “The Arab media is still very much state-owned and state-controlled,” agreed Anwar Gargash, a political science professor at United Arab Emirates University, during the same conversation. “The way forward is to break the chains of the media.”

As the levers of media control, and thus the power to shape perceptions, slowly – very slowly – began to shift away from governments at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Arab journalists were being buffeted by an array of competing forces – some lethal – as they attempted to redefine themselves and their profession. “Profession” That word alone epitomized the sea-change underway in a region where reporters had too often served as apologists for dictators and autocrats or sold their souls for an envelope of cash. Most Arab journalists remained subject to pressures that ranged from subtle political “guidance” to threats of imprisonment and death, as the assassinations and attempted assassinations of journalists in Lebanon so vividly demonstrated. Yet in newsrooms across the Arab world, journalists were exhibiting a newfound sense of professional purpose.

This writer is part of a generation of American reporters who flocked to journalism schools in the early 1970s. Vietnam and Watergate had inspired us to believe we could change the world. That same sense of excitement could be found among aspiring young Arab reporters in the first decade of the new century – the journalistic children of the Al-Jazeera generation. “I can’t criticize from within my country,” wrote one of my journalism students at The American University in Cairo (AUC), explaining why she wanted to report for the Arab satellite channels, “but journalism allows me to criticize from outside and begin to make things different.” Even many of the elders of Arab journalism had a new view of themselves and their mission. “We can’t say the government changed the media, we changed the media,” said Hassan Amr, a longtime reporter for Egypt’s official press who helped found an independent newspaper, called Al-Fajr (The Dawn) to signify that a new day has arrived. “We face pressures but enjoy a lot of freedom now. Even in the [government-controlled] national newspapers, there is a lot of change taking place.” It was “an exciting and disgusting” time to be a journalist, LBC anchor Tania Mehanna told me with an ironic grin.

Everywhere the rules were in flux; everywhere reporters struggled to maintain their equilibrium on the constantly shifting sands. In Egypt, where media regulations adopted in 1995 were referred to by journalists as the “Press Assassination Law,” the 2005 election brought a slight loosening of the reins on media, but once the last vote was tallied scores of journalists – including women – were attacked, beaten, threatened, or jailed. “Egyptian journalism,” said Osama al-Ghazli Harb, chief editor of Al-Siyasah Al-Dawliyah, “is developing on a tortured journey due to political manipulation.” In Iraq, the deadliest place in the world for reporters and home to scores of newly created media outlets, journalists were being killed for being perceived as too close to the government, too close to the resistance, or too close to particular political parties. “Sometimes they target journalists just to scare journalists in general,” according to Nabil Khatib, executive editor of the pan-Arab news channel Al-Arabiya. Militant groups ran their own pseudo-news agencies and one motive for the attacks was to make it impossible for actual news organizations to operate. “They are supplying the media [with information and footage] and they pressure you in a way to impose their agenda on you,” Khatib explained. “Of course we refuse, because we do not want to be used by any party whoever it is – so we pay the price.” The tactics were effective. By the spring of 2007, Al-Arabiya had lost 11 staffers to Iraq’s violence, several in targeted assassinations, and was left relying largely on local freelancers. “You feel that you are covering the war as if through glass,” Khatib told me sadly.

In less violent locales, the risks were different, but still very real. Saudi Arabia’s Al-Watan went through four editors in three years as news executives tried to interpret conflicting signals from within the House of Saud, even as the number of journalists detained in the Kingdom continued to climb. That wasn’t the only consequence of straying from the party line. For example, a religious court ordered journalist Mansour Nogaidan of the daily Al-Riyadh to receive 75 lashes for “calling for freedom of speech and criticizing Wahabism,” Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islam.² And across the region, many journalists were paying the ultimate price. In all, according to Reporters Without Borders, at least 88 Arab journalists were killed between 2001 and 2008, only some of them in the conflicts in Iraq and Palestine. Examples included Algerian newscaster Murad Belqasem, 43, stabbed in his apartment; Kuwaiti writer Hidaya Salem, 65, shot to death parking her car; Sudanese writer Mohammad Taha, 50, tortured and killed for writings that were considered offensive to the system and the community; and Palestinian Khalil Ziben, 59, known for his controversial writings over the Palestinian internal situation, who was killed as he was about to get into his car early one morning.³

In May 2007, I received the following email from Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer, who was born and raised in a refugee camp outside the border town of Rafah in Gaza, from where he continued to report:

I’m scared, I was almost killed or at least bleeding till death. three militants were closing all roads and they sudden, they said to me stop during the curfew, I stop and then the masked-men open fire under my feet hitting the ground under my feet. I thought I’m killed, and I could not explain or scream as the shooting was louder than my scream, so I said: “No, don’t do that, stop stop, please” oh, I was in tears, this is the first time I’m begging someone not to kill me, and then the other guy who’s also militant was standing in my side and said, we don’t want to kill him, lets shoot him in his legs and leave him bleed. I said, what? why? and then he said, your ID, I show it with the press card and then they let me go. I was scared that they would shoot at me once I turn my back, but alhamdllah this didn’t happen, I was scared, scared, scared to death. This was not pleasant experience, and they were doing this, as I got stuck and could not find transport back home, so I went walking in the streets. I’m scared to death. Those are just evil and terrible people. I don’t wish to be in that position again. I can’t stand in my feet anymore, I feel pain and scared. Those [gunmen] are working for preventive security, which is working closely with Israelis. I was wearing my bullet proof vest, but this didn’t protect me enough. Today, more than 10 were killed and tens were injured, many by Israelis, but still some by Palestinian clashes between Hamas and Fateh. They don’t want this to be reported. I didn’t tell about this to my mother, she will be scared again!

sad greetings!
Mohammed

In September 2008, this email arrived from Europe, where Omer was undergoing surgery:

Dear Lawrence,

sorry for not being able to keep in touch lately, but it’s due to mistreatment and torture that I had to go through.

Mohammed

“I am not exaggerating when I say the Arab press is witnessing one of the worst periods of its life,” Salaheddine el-Hafez, vice editor-in-chief of Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspaper and secretary general of the Arab Journalists Association, told a press freedom conference in late 2006. “The margins of freedom for the Arab press are severely limited and we have evidence of that in our daily lives.”⁴

Journalism in the Levant

Lebanon has always been the region’s media Tower of Babel; its highly ideological press representing – often bought-and-paid-for by – a range of Middle East governments and political movements. As the new century dawned, that was still true. What began to change in the spring of 2005 was the way reporters looked at themselves and each other. The media-led popular uprising against Syrian occupation that year produced a shared sense of mission. Journalism itself – briefly – began to emerge as a new ideology. “We feel we can no longer just represent some, we must represent all,” I was told by a young reporter with the traditionally pro-Syrian newspaper As-Safir, which was reevaluating its own mission following Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon. But life at the hard edge of media independence could be dangerous. Journalist Mai Chidiac learned that in the fall of 2005 when her left arm and leg were blown off by a bomb placed under the seat of her car. An anchor and talk show host at the privately owned LBC, she had been an outspoken critic of Syrian involvement in Lebanon. The bombing was seen by journalists as a clear message to all those who dared use the media to attack the Damascus regime.

Driving down the coastal highway from Jounieh to Beirut after a televised media solidarity rally for Chidiac, anti-Syrian radio talk show host Rima Njeim fielded serial phone calls – one hand on the wheel of her BMW, the other on the phone – as her producer, Johnny el-Saddik, told me of the endless death threats Njeim received from what Lebanese reporters had come to call “the unseen hand.” Warned one email: “We know where your children go to school.” Unlike Njeim, many reporters in Lebanon no longer drove their own cars for fear of what might happen when they turned the ignition key. Some were also censoring themselves. “I think my life is more important than any other thing,” Caroline Beaini, Beirut correspondent for Abu Dhabi TV, told me later that same day. “Even if I am a journalist that does not mean that I should die for the cause. The cause is not worth enough to die for.”

In a twisted kind of way, the attacks on reporters in Lebanon were a compliment to the growing influence of Arab journalism. In the weeks before his assassination, former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri had been called in by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and ordered to either force Beirut-based An-Nahar, arguably the most respected mainstream daily in the Arab world, to end its criticism of the Damascus regime or to sell his 20 percent stake in the company. Hariri opted to sell. “Bashar al-Assad could not understand that Hariri could never make us stand with him [Assad],” Ghassan Tueni recalled of the incident. It was not the first time the Syrian leader had tried to force the paper to shift its stance. In one of the small glassed-in offices off the An-Nahar newsroom, a Lebanese flag lay draped over the chair of Samir Kassir as a memorial to the outspoken, anti-Syrian columnist whose white Alpha Romeo had exploded in a ball of flames the previous spring. “I still can’t believe it,” whispered reporter Roula Mouawad as she paused before the glassed-in office. Kassir’s likeness was etched on a plaque beside the door, along with the dates: 1960–2005. “We have to fight for them, and the next,” Mouawad said later over coffee, referring to her fallen colleagues, “because there will be a next.” Subsequent events would bear her out.

The attacks also highlighted the degree to which journalism and politics overlapped on this new Arab media landscape. Gibran Tueni was a leader of the anti-Syrian bloc in parliament, Chidiac’s program was a showcase for anti-Syrian politicians, just as her station, LBC, was a key media voice of the anti-Syrian opposition, and Kassir was a rallying figure within the Kifaya (Enough) movement, which targeted the Syrian presence. In him, fellow columnist Rami Khouri later said, “converged the job of a journalist and someone in the business of political and cultural mobilization.” There was every reason to believe that this duality of roles – journalist and politician – would live on at An-Nahar. In a highly political speech marking the third anniversary of her father’s murder, Nayla Tueni, heir-apparent to the newspaper dynasty, lashed out at Syria and its allies in Lebanon, appealed directly to fellow Christians to support the anti-Syrian political block, and vowed that the “blood” of her father would brook no “treason,” prompting one government minister to walk out of the hall. Over white wine in her late father’s office later that evening, Nayla glanced at Gibran’s desk, untouched since his death, and told me that the “Naharists” would not be silenced. Nahar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction A Matter of Perspective
• PART I The Media Landscape
• Chapter 1 Red Lines - The Boundaries of Journalistic Freedom
• Chapter 2 Satellite TV and Arab Democracy
• Chapter 3 Media Politics and Corporate Feudalism
• Chapter 4 Islam, Nationalism and the Media
• Chapter 5 Covering Darfur - A Question of Identity
• Chapter 6 Arab Journalism in Context
• Chapter 7 Western Ethics, Western Arrogance
• PART II Survey Findings
• Chapter 8 The Mission of Arab Journalism
• Chapter 9 Journalistic Roles - Arabs, Americansand the World
• Chapter 10 Arab Journalists Look at Themselves and the Competition
• Chapter 11 Arab Journalists and the Arab People
• PART III Conclusion
• Chapter 12 Border Guards of the New Arab Consciousness
• Postscript New Media, New Media Models
• Notes
• Bibliography